{"id":1932,"date":"2014-05-11T08:17:01","date_gmt":"2014-05-11T12:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1932"},"modified":"2016-10-20T18:05:35","modified_gmt":"2016-10-20T22:05:35","slug":"the-dream-of-the-great-american-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1932","title":{"rendered":"The Dream of the Great American Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"classics,<\/a>

(picture: upload.wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

I hold out my hand. Take it, and wade with me into the murky waters of literary criticism as we consider the Great American Novel. Or, rather, Lawrence Buell\u2019s 584-page new survey, The Dream of the Great American Novel<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019ve read several lengthy reviews of this book, as well as excerpts, and although I want to warm to the subject, I am feeling the chill of excessive academicism. Yes, there has to be more to literary criticism than \u201cI liked it,\u201d but I\u2019m not ready to sacrifice on the altar of subjectivity my regard for an author\u2019s achievement of beautiful writing or the creation of drama involving believable characters.<\/p>\n

The entire concept of a Great American Novel (or G.A.N. as Henry James mockingly dubbed it) has come under repeated waves of skepticism, surviving \u201cmore as a dream than a goal,\u201d Adam Gopnik suggests in his review in The New Yorker <\/em>review (link below). Buell himself suggests that critics have believed the G.A.N. was \u201ca misguided amateurish notion that had long since outlived its usefulness if ever it had any.\u201d By the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Kimmage says in The New Republic<\/em><\/a>, literary scholars \u201crejected the very notion of an American literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrative form of the idealized G.A.N, Buell says in Salon<\/em> (link below), is expected to \u201creplicate the nation\u2019s vast, sprawling, semichaotic social textures and landscapes from the macro to the minute.\u201d Such an endeavor has been decried by some critics as \u201cdocumentation for its own sake\u201d and \u201cthe great American bore.\u201d Yet, the sweeping realistic novel that would describe all social classes and stations of a particular historical period, that would have a narrative agenda\u2014think Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, or Zola\u2014has not typically appeared in American literature. As Gopnik suggests, \u201cin a country dedicated to the proposition of the autonomous individual, books about people defined by their place in a social web will never fly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buell believes our greatest novels have splintered into four main subtypes, or \u201cscripts\u201d (and many of his observations apply equally well to American movies): tales of sexual transgression and punishment (e.g., The Scarlet Letter<\/em> and its multitudinous progeny); the \u201cup from\u201d novel, which follows the protagonist from obscurity to prominence, and often back again; the romance of the divide, which dramatizes racial, cultural, or geographic fissures (all of Faulkner; Gatsby<\/em>); and the \u201ccompendious meganovel,\u201d which is generally not a true societal macrocosm, but more of a microscopic examination of a particular group of people or episode(The Goldfinch, Underworld, <\/em>possibly).<\/p>\n

Buell bases part of his analysis on the democratic notion that bloggers, internet chatters, and Amazon commenters\u2019 views are important, too, thereby eroding the \u201cfirmness of the high culture versus mass culture distinction.\u201d That seems admirable in concept, but shaky in execution, having tested my perceptions of various books against those of my fellow-amazonians and found bewildering diversity, with \u201cBrilliant\u2014best book ever!\u201d followed by \u201cBlech. Couldn\u2019t finish it.\u201d And, all-too-clearly, what sells is not the same as what is of lasting value.<\/p>\n

For the record, books repeatedly cited as leading G.A.N. candidates by Buell and his reviewers include the schoolroom staples: Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, <\/em>and Huckleberry Finn,<\/em> along with Philip Roth\u2019s \u201cAmerican Trilogy,\u201d Ralph Ellison\u2019s The<\/em> Invisible Man<\/em>, and Toni Morrison\u2019s Beloved<\/em>. (By contrast, the aforementioned readers place at the top of their lists of favorite books<\/a> the works of Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, and The Lord of the Rings<\/em>.) More recent G.A.N. candidates include David Foster Wallace\u2019s Infinite Jest<\/em> and Jonathan Franzen\u2019s The Corrections<\/em>. I did finish that one, but I didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

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